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Monday, November 06, 2006

Chart thinning/art thinning

If you work in a hospital you know about chart thinning- basically a bunch of stuff goes in your chart and then, if you have tons of pages they go through and weed out unnecessary stuff- well as a mom you do the same thing with your child's art. You have the dreaded task of art thinning. Yes for the past 3 yrs I have been stuffing all of smart sons work under one of the beds in a giant bin- well he is quite prolific and the other day i had the thinning task because the bin was way beyond capacity. It brought back many memories of mom and son moments of days gone by. I absolutely love some of smart sons early works, I am a big fan of qualitative research. I like to hear real people's stories and children's art (as argued in my graduate thesis is one of the most true snapshots of a child). Well here is what I pitched (See Left) and here is what I saved (see right). It reminded me of smart son's uniqueness, It also reminded me that your moments with your child are what you make of them. So today go out of you way to do one thing that might be messy or inconvienient or just spare those extra few minutes. It also made me really continue to think hard about the educational path for smart son. We debated long and hard this year- public, private, charter, homeschool- we decided on a "try it and see" public school year. Smart son- other than being very unchallenged loves school bu ti still can't put to rest my qualms with the great disparity between what he is capable of and what i think a good education is and the type of work being required of him in school. I am tossing and turning at night and I just can't feel good about it- maybe it's the ghosts of my own unchallenged years in public school haunting me. I called another private school today...so we shall see.

7 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Art thinning.. not something I am looking forward to. I once saw a family who framed all of their kids art and had it hung all over their family room, literally covering the walls. (they had 10 kids!!) It was cool, I think I *might* want to do that.

Good luck with the school decision!! My kids are only in preschool and that is hard enough.

I'm interested in your grad thesis - I just found some of my own childhood artwork a few days ago and was thinking about what it said about me as a child...it really is a special glimpse.

My little boys just drew his first self-conceived (and recognizable) picture (of a lion) and just looking at it makes me cry because it is so clever and cute and creative and it came totally from him. I love it and decided to keep it forever. I think it will pass several art thinnings. :)

And good for you - recognizing that kids need to stretch and explore, not just to regurgitate. :)Good luck finding a good fit for smart son!

CYM- I did qualitative research doing content analysis of children's diary drawings (looking at stress coping behaviors)- as it is arguably as expressive a form as they are capable of in early childhood.I adore what they create- it is so special!

K's artwork is the only thing I allow to grace the prestine doors of my fridge. And I display it proudly. It helps that he hardly ever has interest in coloring and the like, so there isn't much of it. It's his imagination and pretending I somehow need to "store" better.

I'd love to hear your perspective on my 5 yr-old son's artwork. In truth, his drawings were one of the markers for us to pursue screenings, etc., for adhd. He draws from an overhead perspective with many overlapping people and actions. There is very little white space in his work.

I'm in the process of thinning a quarter's worth of school work for 4 children. It feels nice to know that I'm not alone with the paper trail! Chrissy (singalullaby.typepad)

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**Disclaimer** I publish in rough draft, uncut form and I "just say no" to spell checker.

As a mom busy growing up 3 little boys, I want to teach them to be smart! And by that I mean to think, to make wise choices, to care about the important things, to help make the world better, and use up their lives on the things that really matter.